The paper ruined a long list of more or less famous men by exposing the fact that they had visited prostitutes. And yet, in search of more of these stories, one News of the World reporter was told to make contacts among high-class sex workers with the specific instruction that he should have sex with them, do cocaine with them and claim it all on expenses. So he did.

If it's anywhere near as good as Flat Earth News it'll be an interesting read.

TheRealBadabing wrote:Oh crap, one of our advertisers is linked to the X that caused Y and they aren't happy.

See how the shit gets buried? Why journalists end up tapping the phones of dead murdered children? They don't start out that way but the knife fight that is commercial journalism means that everything ends up tainted.

State intervention is wrong but fuck me they haven't exactly done a great job of regulating themselves for the past 20 years, have they?

Thought I'd quote you for a current news giggle.

I can't remember what came of the Levenson recommendations. Last I read, an alternative to the PCC was being set-up, but very slowly and there was no Royal Charter for anything and no indication that newsgroup would sign up to anything anyway.

Wonder how this Telegraph scandal will affect whatever is planned to replace the PCC.

Many newspapers have praised Mr Cameron's opposition to law-backed regulation of the press, but a Daily Telegraph editorial published online said Lord Justice Leveson was right to say the press could no longer "mark its own homework".

It said: "While adopting many of the ideas for an improved regulator put forward by Lords Hunt and Black, Sir Brian [Leveson] insists that the press should not be able to 'mark its own homework' by controlling the new body.

"He is right - the new regulator should largely conform to the format outlined in the report, in terms of its structure, its independence from Fleet Street, and its powers to impose discipline."

The “industrial scale” of phone hacking at the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and the People made the News of the World look like a “small cottage industry” in comparison, the high court in London has heard. Scores of celebrities, including the actor Sadie Frost and ex-footballer Paul Gascoigne, were targeted thousands of times by journalists using the illegal practice from mid-1999 until 2009, it was claimed.

In the first hint of the true extent of phone hacking at the three titles, the court heard that the former Sunday Mirror journalist Dan Evans hacked about 100 celebrities every day from 2003 to mid-2004. Such was the reliance on phone hacking for stories that one senior journalist was desperate for Evans to create “an enigma-type machine that would automatically crack pin codes”, the court was told.

I was listening to poor old Gazza on the TV a couple of days back and I did feel sorry for him. I know he's a dickhead, but I don't know how anyone would cope with paranoia the phone hacking must have induced with him. Not to mention that the selfsame people would have been offering to be his friends and claiming to be supporting him, while picking his pockets for cheap stories.

If Piers Morgan gets away without any blame for any of this, it will be a terrible injustice. I do hope someone rats him out.